Interaction Nets, Combinators, and Calculus – HVM | Hacker News Reader

Interaction Nets, Combinators, and Calculus – HVM

zicklag.github.io

114 pointserlend_sh9 comments

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Discussed today:

Higher-Order Virtual Machine (HVM)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35336113 (33 comments)

Unfortunate acronym choice considering the term HVM is already used to refer to Hardware assisted Virtual Machines. [0]

[0]: https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Software_Overvi...

I think that's OK. Every time I look up a 3 letter initialism on Wikipedia, I have to scroll through dozens of irrelevant articles to find the one I'm looking for.

> A caveat of this technique for reducing lambdas is that it doesn't exactly match the behavior of the normal lambda calculus. While it might reduce the same as the normal lambda calculus in many cases, it doesn't always. And that's totally fine, it doesn't need to match perfectly to be useful in it's own right.

This seems like a serious problem for something trying to be so foundational... I'm kind of surprused the author doesn't go into more detail about it. Why is this fine? If not for evaluating arbitrary programs, what is HVM useful for?

I think this kind of sentence makes such a huge disservice for the HVM. Rust closures also doesn't support the full λ-calculus! HVM supports way more λ-terms than Rust does. That said, we're working on full λ-calculus support, so this shouldn't be a problem soon.

Aha-- so then HVM allows a more efficient reduction of some lambda terms, but is not intended to replace something like GHC core?

What is the subset of lambda terms which HVM can (soundly) evaluate?

Well, it should be a viable alternative to GHC once we implement full lambdas, but without them, it should be seen as a separate language, just like Rust.

The complete subset of lambda terms that HVM can soundly evaluate hasn't been identified yet. It is known that HVM can, at least, soundly evaluate all terms typeable on Elementary Affine Logic (EAL), but, while that is a huge set, it isn't comprehensive, as HVM can evaluate many terms outside of EAL, including recursive terms such as the Y-Combinator.

Interesting-- thanks!

Very well written and beautiful article.

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